EU pushes back on Biden plan to waive coronavirus vaccine patents

EU pushes back on Biden plan to waive coronavirus vaccine patents

 

Leaders point finger at US and UK as geopolitical contest heats up.

 

BY DAVID M. HERSZENHORN AND RYM MOMTAZ

May 8, 2021 1:11 pm

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-pushes-back-on-biden-plan-to-waive-patents-as-contest-escalates-in-global-vaccine-diplomacy/

 

PORTO, Portugal — EU leaders have a question for the President of the United States about waiving vaccine patents: So, how exactly is this going to go, Joe?

 

Joe Biden may have set Europe on its heels with his surprise proposal to suspend intellectual property rights, but at a European Council summit in Porto, Portugal, top EU officials are pushing back hard, saying Washington has not put forward a specific plan and that, in the near term, waiving patents would not help with the immediate, urgent need to increase production. 

 

“On the intellectual property, we don’t think in the short term that it’s the magic bullet but we are ready to engage on this topic as soon as a concrete proposal will be put on the table,” European Council President Charles Michel said Saturday morning, summarizing a roughly three-hour dinner discussion among leaders on Friday night about the pandemic.

 

“We all agree that we need to do everything which is possible in order to increase everywhere in the world the production of vaccines,” Michel said.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron was even more pointed in calling on the U.S. and the U.K. first to take more important steps: ending de facto bans on vaccine exports; sharing technology needed to ramp up production; and donating existing doses.

 

"The Anglo-Saxons must first stop their export bans," Macron said, in reference to the U.S. and the U.K.

 

Waiving patents, the French president said, should be fourth on the list of priorities. “If we want to work quickly, today there isn’t one factory in the world that can’t produce doses for poor countries because of intellectual property,” Macron said, arriving at the summit. “The priority today is not intellectual property — it’s not true. We would be lying to ourselves. It’s production.”

 

Companies that want to produce vaccines using a waiver acknowledge that a change in intellectual property rules would not mean they could instantly start churning out doses. But they say it would be a key step in allowing more manufacturers to make the vaccines.

 

During the leaders’ dinner discussion, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was participating remotely by videolink, warned her colleagues that Biden’s proposal must be considered carefully, noting that a patent waiver could do more to benefit a geopolitical rival like China, which has production capacity to make use of Western mRNA technology, than it would to help needy countries in Africa obtain vaccines.